2015 Edublogs Teacher Challenge Step 1

This series is for educators who want to have their own personal blog where they document their learning, share their teaching practices or use to create a portfolio of their work.
Each week I will be sent emails consisting of a link to the content to read, as well a task to complete as part of the challenge.

STEP 1 related to setting up the blog and choosing its theme and appearance.
We were advised to check whether the theme we had chosen would be able to be viewed successfully on mobile devices and I was pleased to find that all three of my blogs are mobile friendly.
I have also created a gravatar now so that I have my personal avatar picture which will appear with comments I leave on blogs replacing the nondescript squiggle picture that used to appear.

Here are my responses to the exercises set for Week 1 and the feedback I received

STEP 1 RESPONSE

1) I love The Edublogger because it is packed with information and support
I also like Free Technology for Teachers and Teacher Reboot Camp for the same reason
The blogs that appealed most to me visually were Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the day and Primary Tech.

2) I have 3 current blogs all set up using WordPress

Gifted Resources Blog https://giftedresources.wordpress.com/
This is the blog for Gifted Resources which is an information service for teachers, parents and service providers of gifted and 2E twice exceptional students. The theme used for the blog is Twenty Eleven

Sprite’s Site http://spritessite.wordpress.com/
Sprite is a cartoon character developed to illustrate presentations about 2E twice exceptional students who are both gifted and also have learning difficulties or differences
The theme used for the blog is Twenty Eleven

3) My new blog which I will be using for this Challenge
Personas, Profiles and Portraits https://jofreitag.wordpress.com/
The theme I used for the new blog is Oxygen.
So far most of the images for this blog are photos which I have taken myself.
Topics that will be discussed on this blog will include
Persona/Diversity Dolls
Personal story narration
Dr. Maureen Neihart and Dr. George Betts Revised Profiles of the Gifted and Talented 2010
Prof Francoys Gagne Differentiated Model of Giftedness & Talent 2.0
Building gifts into talents: Brief overview of the DMGT 2.0
Gifted and 2E Twice exceptional students (who are both gifted and have a learning disability/difference)
De Bono’s 6 Action Shoes
Dabrowski’s Overexcitabilities
The characters and topics from Sprite’s Site blog depicted as dolls and soft toys

I am hoping to learn more about how to use this theme specially including sharing options, widgets etc.
Thank you very much for this opportunity.
WEEK 1 FEEDBACK

4 thoughts on “2015 Edublogs Teacher Challenge Step 1”

Thanks for sharing your reflections and thanks for the nice words about The Edublogger!

Origin is a mobile friendly theme but the text is a bit harder to read on this blog on a computer compared to some of the other themes. if you compare the text in this post with a post on one of your other blogs on a computer you’ll notice the text is slightly larger on the other blogs. The older mobile friendly themes tended to have smaller text, more similar to what users were used to with the non-responsive themes, and the newer mobile friendly themes generally have larger text.

I would be tempted to try Big Brother on this blog. You can upload your own custom header image with Big Brother. You might feel the font initially is a bit large but size wise it has been optimize to make reading easier.

Thanks Sue! That was one thing I did not like about the Oxygen theme – the text is so small when viewed on the computer! I thought maybe I was just getting old! But I will give Big Brother a try. The other thing I do not like about this one is that it does not have a Home link in the same place as the About and other pages and I could not work out how to fix that.

Wasn’t sure if you had spotted the font was too small as some of our Edublogs users are so used to the non responsive themes that find the larger font of the newer mobile friendly themes overwhelming compared to what they are used to.

You can set up a home link for any theme using a custom menu – http://help.edublogs.org/custom-menu/ The home link is normally added automatically to the custom menu when you first set up the menu however if it doesn’t you just add it using a Link item.

Hemingway is another nice option but your current header would work better on Big Brother. You may need to increase the image to 1220 pixels wide for Big Brother and the select Skip cropping when inserting.